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CFUNITED - Day 2

June 19, 2008 ·

I finally have a brief window to start blogging about what I've been up to for the last few months so I thought I'd start with today and work backwards.
Since the first session was at 8:15am and there were only two sessions before the HostMySite keynote, I slept in and went over to the Convention Center for lunch. Sandwiches and the usual lack of sodas and coffee (more on that below).
Then it was my Event-Driven Programming talk at 1:30pm. It was a packed room but the presentation went too quickly even with additional examples. At least I got a good number of questions this time and not as much of the stunned "deer in the headlights" looks that prevailed at Scotch. I'll see if I can improve it for Saturday's repeat (first thing in the morning - ugh!).
Next I went to Hal Helms "Changing the Game" which started with Clark Valberg introducing the "outsourced" Hal Helms (Ajay from TeraTech) to prove the point that if you build up a good relationship with your clients, being outsourced is less likely (the audience chanted "We want Hal! We want Hal!"). The talk covered material that will be familiar to listeners of Out Loud but it's always good to hear Hal give advice and talk about his experiences.
Last up was Alan Howitt's Amazon EC2 talk. He covered a lot of ground and showed a lot of tools so it was a bit frantic and he ran over but it's really good to see cloud computing exposed to more people. He talked through four uses (temporary servers, permanent "general" servers, web servers without persistence and web server with persistence), explaining the pros and cons of the elastic cloud computing approach and how to leverage the S3 storage system.
I headed back to the hotel and then went to dinner in Cure, the outrageously overpriced bistro / bar in the Grand Hyatt, with a bunch of folks and several of us got stiffed on the bill because the (very slow) wait staff seemed unable to deal with multiple checks.
I skipped the special event because TeraTech wanted $150 for a guest to attend and that seemed outrageous. After chatting to Dana Tierney and Judith Dinowitz in the lobby for a while, I headed up to my room to blog. My wife's off doing legislative work this evening.
So far I haven't managed to snag a coffee at the Convention Center, nor have I managed to grab a morning or afternoon snack. There just aren't enough of either put out for attendees nor is there enough lunch it seems. I heard several folks complain about food running out and the unionized staff don't seem to care. I have lots to complain about with the Convention Center but I'll save that for another entry.

6 responses

You are certainly not alone in your complaints about the catering situations. It seemed to be a consistent theme so far. The venue is nice enough, albeit enormous, but the food and coffee situation needs a lot of work.

Sean, If you want really good food at a decent price at a place a little off the 'tourist path' but that's only a 5 or 6 minute walk from the hotel, I strongly suggest &quot;Teaism&quot;. As their name implies, in addition to great food (I'm particularly fond of their Salmon Bento Box and Zen-Zhou Pearl Bubble Tea) they have an outrageous selection of teas.

They're on 8th St. between E and D (near the Natl. Portrait Gallery) - just take a right out of the hotel onto G, walk to 9th and take a right, take a left onto F (you'll see the Spy Museum there), then your first right onto 8th and they'll be on your right just before the park.

I brought my wife to the Crime &amp; Punishement event last night; her guest pass was $65. Liz told me that both events were only $100.

The C&amp;P event was a big disappointment, and wouldn't have been worth $65 for the both of us. Overcrowded, duplicate content to pad various sections, and a serious lack of food. If you were there to drink (a lot), it might have been worth the money; we weren't.

We left and went to Finn &amp; Porter for some very good sushi &amp; seafood. They even stayed open late to accommodate the crowds which kept showing up.

You are right on about the catering situation at the conference. For the last two days, I've been reaching a lunch a little late (15-20 mins) and every time, they run out of few items. The lack of coffee and/or soda is definitely another nuisance.